Category Archives: Linux

I spend an inordinate amount of time staring at a screen throughout the day. Whether it’s against my will at work, or for fun at home. I hate bright lights and nothing is worse than looking at an application in a monitor with a white background or that is offensively bright. Enter Redshift and Twilight.

These programs have been designed to slowly fade the brightness of your screen to mimic the natural brightness outside. As the screen dims, it also becomes more red in color, which studies have shown to be less detrimental and disruptive to your body’s circadian rhythm and secretion of melatonin. Although my abnormal sleep schedule prevents me from speaking as to these applications’ sleep benefits, I can say that they have reduced my eye strain and incidence of headaches. It is much more pleasant to view my computer and smartphone screens at night or in a darkened environment. If you are bothered by bright screens and want an automatic fix that is a step above manually adjusting the brightness, give these apps a try. I no longer use a computer without installing these first if I can help it.

The setup for Twilight is simple and self explanatory, the setup for Redshift takes a little more work. Here’s how to configure it for your location and to get it to run at startup:

Obtain local GPS coordinates

Google "GPS coordinates of _your city_" or navigate to google maps and type in your address. Right click on map next to location, click "What's here", and get GPS coordinates from updated search bar above. ie: 36.111807,-115.16919

Create and test redshift command

$ redshift -l [your gps coordinates ie: 36.111807:-115.16919] -v

Add to cron

$ crontab -e

Execute redshift command after every reboot

@reboot [your redshift command from above]

If Redshift doesn’t work

FYI: If it is early in the day, your screen may not get much dimmer/redder

Check your GPS coordinates for proper formatting, should be:

LATITUDE:LONGITUDE

Try running in different video modes by appending the following to your redshift command:

Where to download

Fed up with the commandline and just want to drag and drop some files on to your network connected raspberry pi? Look no further than the oft-forgotten FISH protocol.

No, not that kind of fish

Fish is a simple and easy to use SSH file transfer protocol that can be used in Dolphin and Konqueror file managers/browsers. It allows you to share files between computers (including raspberry pi, woohoo) securely through SSH, all from the convenience of your GUI file manager.

To use it, simply open Dolphin or Konqueror, and type in the address bar:

Assuming you have all the basic dependencies like openssh, you should get a prompt that has you input the raspberry pi user password. Once entered, you’ll be on your way to easily swapping files without having to resort to running ftp servers, using scp, rsync or moving things manually to the SD card.

Obviously, this feature isn’t limited to just the raspberry pi. You can use it for transfers between other SSH accessible computers as well.